Poster #216 - The Predictive Effect of Emotion Recognition on Emotion Regulation Strategy use in 12-Month-Old Infants

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Introduction
The ability to regulate one’s emotional response is a critical component of socioemotional competence in early childhood (Kopp, 1989). Successful emotion regulation is associated with the development of adaptive social behaviours (Calkins, Gill, Johnson, & Smith, 2006), while poor emotion regulation ability is associated with childhood externalizing and internalizing behaviours (Hill, Degnan, & Calkins, 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2001; John & Gross, 2004). While the importance of emotion regulation has been well established, the origin of individual differences in this ability remains less understood. Early attention skills, and attention to relevant affective information specifically, has been put forth as one underlying mechanism (Martinos, Matheson, & de Haan, 2012; Ravicz, Perdue, Westerlund, Vanderwert, & Nelson, 2015); however, few studies have investigated the relationship between early emotion recognition and later emotion regulation skills in a longitudinal design across the first year of life. In the current study, we are investigating whether differential attention towards critical facial features at 7 months predicts emotion regulation strategy use at 12 months.
Method
Preliminary analyses include data from 40 7-month-old infants. Data collection and analysis at the 12 month follow-up is ongoing (17 infants have been tested to date). At 7 months, eye tracking was used to measure the percentage of looking time towards the critical features (i.e., eyes and mouth) of angry, fearful, happy, sad, and neutral dynamic facial expressions. At 12 months, infants and their primary caregiver completed a toy removal task (Stifter & Braungart, 1995), whereby parents removed a toy from infants after engaging in play. From this task, we will code for the frequency and duration of time that the infant engaged in various emotion regulation strategies (e.g., orienting to parent, self-soothing, distraction), as well as a global frustration score from the 2-minute toy removal phase.
Hypotheses
We hypothesized that infants who exhibited greater attention towards critical features (7 months) would engage in greater use of emotion regulation strategies (12 months). Specifically, we predicted that greater looking time towards the eye region of angry, fearful, sad, and neutral expressions, and the mouth region of happy expressions would be associated with increased use of distraction, (including self-soothing), orienting towards a parent, and decreased frustration at 12 months.
Results
For the dynamic emotion recognition task, we ran a 5 (emotion) x 2 (feature) repeated-measure ANOVA, and found the anticipated interaction between emotion and feature, F(2.87, 156) = 18.38, p <.001, η2 = .32 (Figure 1). Follow-up analyses revealed that infants exhibited greater looking time towards the eye region of angry, fearful, neutral, and sad expressions compared to happy expressions (ps <.05), and the mouth region of happy expressions compared to all other expressions (ps <.001). Behavioural coding of emotion regulation strategy use at 12 months is ongoing. We plan to run a linear regression analysis to examine whether emotion recognition at 7 months predicts increased use of emotion regulation strategies at 12 months. This research has important implications for understanding the developmental underpinnings of differences in emotion regulation ability.

Authors

• Shira Segal, Ryerson University
  Presenting Author

• Alexandra R Marquis, Ryerson University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alysha Bernstein, Ryerson University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Margaret Moulson, Ryerson University
  Non-Presenting Author